The jobs weren’t with Prescott Hotshots, the oldest crew in town. They were with Granite Mountain Hotshots. The new guys. The upstarts.
Granite Mountain was already a minor legend in hotshot circles. It was started in 2002, and it was the first hotshot outfit attached to a city fire department in the nation. Most crews are primarily state or county outfits. Granite Mountain was special. It was the only city-employed hotshot crew and the first outfit to have that distinction.
Granite Mountain was known for going anywhere and fighting any kind of fire. High desert, low desert valleys, grasslands, salt cedar riverbank, big timber, ranchland, wildland-urban interface, didn’t matter; if you called Granite Mountain, they came. Arizona, California, Montana, or Minnesota, they got the call. They got helicoptered out to jobs in the remote wilderness and stayed there for two weeks, living like Lewis and Clark out on the frontier.
The supervisor of Granite Mountain was a guy named Eric Marsh. I’d heard of him. He was a North Carolinian, an outdoorsman, movie-star handsome, former rugby player, a degree in biology from Appalachian State. He’d helped create the Granite Mountain crew nine years earlier. It was his baby.
I wanted to be part of it. Honestly, I wanted anything that paid $12.83 an hour and more with overtime. If it involved risking my life, I really didn’t give a damn. Bring it on.
There was another thing about hotshottin’ that appealed to me. I’d grown to love the Southwest: the desert, the toughness and humility of the people, the self-reliance. I wanted to feel I was a part of that. Maybe I needed to fit in, but I was tired of being known as a California stoner, and of everything that went with that: the flip-bill baseball hats, the “What’s up, brah?” accent, all of it.
I wanted to grow up, I guess. Become a man and all. And I wanted to be accepted where I lived. I was too broke to afford a horse, so I couldn’t be a cowboy. And there is nothing more Southwestern than being a hotshot.
The day I decided to try to get a job at Granite Mountain, I was working at a ranch, digging holes for a fence surrounding a chicken coop. I’d just been let go from a job at a car dealership where I was in charge of giving oil changes; they couldn’t keep me because my terrible driving record meant I couldn’t get insured. If I didn’t get the Granite Mountain job, I had three realistic options: drug dealing, day labor, or suicide.
I drove to the station in my beat-up Ford Explorer. Granite Mountain operated out of a big shedlike structure made of galvanized metal painted blue, surrounded by a chain-link fence. I drove by the gate and my heart was beating like I was driving in the Daytona 500. I slowed down, did a U-turn, then rolled back, looking at the place out of the corner of my eye.
I could see a few guys walking in and out, getting stuff from their trucks. They wore black T-shirts and green cargo pants and they looked like Navy SEALs to me. Super fit. Tanned. Clean-cut dudes.
I was thin, strung out, and sleeping on my friend’s couch. I’d smoked heroin the week before. My drug spiral was out of control. So I was scared to go in there. I was scared of not being good enough. I was scared they’d look at me and say, “Brendan McDonough? You have got to be kidding me.”
In my six years in Arizona, I’d learned about many things. I knew my way around a bong, the best places to score X wholesale, and the pitfalls of the Arizona court system. But I knew nothing about the wilderness. The only time I’d ventured out into the hills and desert surrounding town was to get wasted. I hadn’t been on so much as a single hike into the Prescott National Forest. I had no idea what the wildland was.
These guys did. They risked their lives out there.
You don’t belong here, I said to myself.
After my third drive-by, I got mad at myself. Goddamn it, Brendan, get in there for your daughter. I jerked the wheel and rolled through the gate.
I got out of the car, almost shaking. I was wearing an old tank top and jeans, and out of some kind of Dale Carnegie impulse I decided to tuck the tank top into my jeans. Then I walked into the station.
For some reason, Abraham Lincoln came into my mind as I entered. Just his nickname, Honest Abe. My life was a series of lies and contradictions, and I was sick of it. Just be like Honest Abe, I told myself. Just tell the truth no matter what. Put it all out on the table.
I walked through the doors and found myself in a little hallway. The first thing I saw was a guy I’d taken my EMT class with, and I smiled in relief. “Hey, Daniel,” I said. “Do you still have any positions open?”
He gave me a strange look. Later he told me that I’d tucked my tank top into my underwear by mistake, and they were visible above the waist of my jeans. What a champ.
“Hey, Brendan. Ah, no, sorry, we don’t. We’re all filled up.”
The floor seemed to sink away. I felt defeat just wash over me.
“Okay, thanks,” I said. It had taken all of five seconds. I turned around.
To my right was an open doorway. As I approached it, a man walked out.
“Hold up,” he said. “You’re looking for a job?”
I didn’t know it then, but this was Eric Marsh. He was tanned and fit, like everyone in the place, but a little older. His eyes were kind. His voice had a bit of a Southern twang at the end of the sentences.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“We’ve got one spot left open. You have your certifications?”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay. Can you do an interview now?”
Now? I felt the fear come back full force. But I made myself nod.
“Yes, sir. Whatever works best.”
He nodded back, his eyes appraising me. “Come on in.”
I walked in after him and saw that there were four other guys in this little office. It was a bare-bones place with an old brown couch to the left and a gunmetal-gray desk to the right. I sat down on the couch and two hotshots sat on the other side of me. Eric pulled up a chair and sat about five feet from me, with two other crew members leaning on his desk on the other side.
I was surrounded by these intense-looking dudes. It was intimidating. Despite my years of fire training and EMT and the rest, I felt like an imposter. I vaguely recognized the guy to Eric’s right, too. Were they aware of my past? Did they know I’d been a drug dealer?
I was insanely nervous. My hands seemed like two enormous blocks of wood; I didn’t know what to do with them. My throat was parched and felt like it was closing up.
Eric asked me my name and when I said it, I felt a kind of hush or chill in the room. The guy on his right stared hard at me, like he’d heard of me, and not in a good way.
I ignored him and answered Eric’s basic questions: social security number and all that. We went through my credentials and Eric seemed impressed. I explained that the reason I’d flunked out of the EMT class was that I wasn’t much of a book person. Eric nodded. I’d enrolled in another EMT class and was passing so far.
But I felt the questions Eric was asking weren’t the real test. He was studying how I reacted to him.
Abe Lincoln, I thought. Tell the truth.
“Is your driver’s license good to go?”
My heart sank. No, it wasn’t. It was suspended. I fessed up.
I felt someone laugh and the guy on Eric’s left rolled his eyes.
“I paid the tickets, but I didn’t know I had to go to class after that. I’m getting it worked out, believe me.”
Eric looked down at his clipboard.
“Have you ever done drugs?”
My gut tightened right up.
“Uh, yeah, I have.”
“Which ones.”
Abe Lincoln.
“Weed, Ecstasy,” I said.
The guy next to me shook his head sadly.
Eric’s face was unreadable. “Anything else?”
“Some pills here and there. But I’ve been clean for a few months.”
I couldn’t bear to tell him about the heroin. There’s honesty and there’s job suicide. I had to be on this crew.
“Do you have any felonies, Brendan?”
Damn it.
“Uh, yes, sir, I do.”
Someone to my right—I didn’t want to look—snorted in disbelief.
I explained what had happened with my buddy and the GPS. I rambled on about how I was on probation and if I didn’t violate the terms, it would be knocked down to a misdemeanor. But I could hear my voice. Spouting technicalities.
Eric’s eyes held mine.
“Brendan,” he said, his voice calm. “Let me ask you a question. What is integrity?”
I was caught off guard.
“Integrity?”
“Yeah.”
I was stumped. This I’d never expected. Some words jumbled out of my mouth, “honesty” and “character” maybe; I was just blabbing anything I could think of. But I had the feeling everyone in that room knew that I had no idea what the word really meant. Not in the way these men did. Integrity had something to do with the way these guys lived, why they trusted each other, why they were willing to put their lives in the hands of their brothers.
And I had no clue.
I could feel the skepticism in the room.
Eric turned and picked up his office phone and called human resources for the city and talked to a woman there about my felony conviction. I could tell how the conversation was going. The woman on the other end was telling him to drop me and get another body. A traffic ticket was no big deal, but a felony? That was a killer.
I felt a headache starting way down at the back of my neck.
He handed the phone to me to explain what was happening with my driver’s license. I told her I was working on getting it reinstated and asked her please not to kill my chance at a job over simple stuff like this. The office was silent, waiting. I handed the phone back to Eric and he said “Uh-huh” a couple of times.
Finally, he hung up and looked at me. “It’s not a deal breaker.”
I breathed out. I felt I had to speak up. I owed him that.
If I get in, I cannot let this man down.
“Listen, guys,” I said. “I’ve made a bunch of mistakes in my life. I’ve done some stupid things that I’m ashamed of. But I have a two-month-old daughter, her name is Michaela, and I’m trying to give her the things I never had. I’m not going to let her down. And because of that, I won’t let you down.”
Eric nodded. I would later learn that he’d had some bumps in his own road. He’d battled a drinking problem for years before beating it. He knew about second chances. Eric’s wife let me know that he saw a lot of himself in me.
“Okay,” Eric said. “We’ll give you a shot.”
I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. The relief was physical, better than any drug I’d ever taken. I thanked the guys and shook everyone’s hands and made some more promises. Then I got the hell out of there before they could change their minds.
Almost any other day, if I’d walked into Granite Mountain, I wouldn’t have gotten a job. Five members of the crew had left for opportunities elsewhere or because the work was simply too grueling. Granite Mountain needed bodies. At nineteen, I would be the youngest man on the crew.
I felt so happy. I had no desire—and no money—to go and have a beer or a toke to celebrate. The first thing I did was call my mom, who I hadn’t spoken to in weeks, and tell her the news.
“I’m so happy, Brendan,” she said quietly. I could hear the caution in her voice. I had always been a guy with big plans, and she’d become wary of my pronouncements, but I could tell she wanted to believe. So did I.
There was one problem. I didn’t have any money to rent a place, and I knew the training was going to be exhausting. I had to be rested and stable in order to keep the job. Sleeping on my buddy’s couch and eating junk food wasn’t going to cut it.
There really was only one other option.
“Mom, can I come back home?” I said.
“You bet,” she finally said.
I hung up and cried. I felt like I’d been standing on a cliff, slowly leaning over until I was about to fall into oblivion. And at the last minute, a hand had reached out and snatched my hand, pulling me back. I didn’t know if it was luck or God or just chance, but I was so filled with gratitude that it was overwhelming.
That night, I went to Natalie’s place and picked up Michaela. I held her in my arms. For the first time, I felt worthy of that trusting look in her eyes. I just stood there, holding my daughter, crying tears of joy.
It was the first time I really felt like a father.